While there are recording devices that use various types of recording media, integrated recorders that incorporate the functions of both digital versatile disk (DVD) and hard disk (HD) recorders have flooded the market in recent years.
Integrated recorders are able to record contents onto both HD and DVD, although, generally, large-capacity HDs over 100 GB (gigabytes) are used to facilitate the temporary storage of large numbers of contents acquired from television broadcasts, while interchangeable DVDs are used for long-term storage of contents. For this reason, a common mode of usage is for contents selected by the user from those temporarily stored on HD to be duplicated (hereinafter referred to as “dubbing”) from HD to DVD.
Dubbing methods include re-encoding, which involves changing both the allotted bitrate and encoding method of content video streams at the time of dubbing, and high-speed dubbing, which involves copying contents as they are, as files in the file system of the recording medium. However, even with the high-speed dubbing, which takes less time than re-encoding, approximately 1 hour is needed to dub a single DVD worth (4.7 GB) of contents. Speeding up the DVD drive device helps to shorten this processing time, although since AV devices and other integrated recorders for consumer use are also required to be low noise, dubbing speeds achievable using this method currently remain at around three times normal speed. Around 30 minutes processing time (including verification, etc) is needed to dub a single DVD worth of contents at three times normal speed.
Since the processing time required in the dubbing corresponds to the volume of the content being dubbed, the broadcast start-time of contents for unattended recording sometimes arrives while dubbing is still being performed. Because recording devices generally prioritize dubbing so that unattended recording is not executed while dubbing is being performed, contents that the user wanted to record get overlooked if preset recording times arrive during dubbing operations.
In view of this, an approach that prioritizes unattended recording can be adopted to discontinue the dubbing when a preset recording time arrives. However, part of the source content is omitted (i.e. not dubbed) when unattended recording is prioritized, making this approach unsatisfactory for the long-term storage originally intended.